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Torex pair face FRC probe

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12th Dec 2013
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Convicted Torex Retail accountants Christopher Moore and Mark Woodbridge will now face investigation by the Financial Reporting Council’s Accountancy Scheme.

The pair were jailed earlier this year. As the Serious Fraud Office explained, Moore, the former executive chairman of the failed cash register software company, pleaded guilty along with former chairman Robert Loosemore in January to conspiring to defraud the company’s shareholders by falsely inflating by £6.5m the cash at bank/revenue figures of the company's interim results published on 14 August 2006.

To justify the claimed cash assets, the pair created a false distribution agreement worth £5m between Torex and Loosemore’s private firm Magdalen Consulting Ltd, along with a “goodwill deposit” agreement supposedly worth £1.5m between Torex and Loosemore.

Moore received a 30-month sentence with £100,000 costs for the deception; Loosemore 20 months and £50,000.

Woodbridge, however, went to trial in Whitney in June and was found guilty of conspiring with the other two defendants to defraud shareholders in late 2006 and early 2007 by creating a further variation to the bogus distribution agreement with Magdalen Consulting to sustain the original fraud. 

While he was acquitted on two charges of false accounting, Woodbridge was convicted on a third of causing revenue of £2m to be falsely recognised in the company's interim financial statement in August 2006. He was sentenced  to three years and ten months' imprisonment with an order to pay costs of £170,000. He was also disqualified from acting as a company director for three years.

Torex Retail went into administration in 2007 and was investigated by the SFO, which later charged former Torex finance director Christopher Ford along with the chief technology officer of its Xn Checkout subsidiary, Edwin Dayan, with conspiracy to defraud, false accounting and misleading an auditor between March and July 2006.

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